Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. Moreover, there was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity—not that I tested it, ever. I rather gladly respected it as the necessary secretiveness of the great poet, one who must have taught himself early not to talk in prose, loosely and at random, of things that he knew how to say much more satisfactorily in the condensed concentration of poetry. Reticence may be the déformation professionnelle of the poet. In Auden’s case, this seemed all the more likely because much of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out of idioms of everyday language—like “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.” This kind of perfection is very rare; we find it in some of the greatest of Goethe’s poems, and it must exist in most of Pushkin’s works, because their hallmark is that they are untranslatable. The moment poems of this kind are wrenched from their original abode, they disappear in a cloud of banality. Here all depends on the “fluent gestures” in “elevating facts from the prosaic to the poetic”—a point that the critic Clive James stressed in his essay on Auden in Commentary in December 1973. Where such fluency is achieved, we are magically convinced that everyday speech is latently poetic, and, taught by the poets, our ears open up to the true mysteries of language. The very untranslatability of one of Auden’s poems is what, many years ago, convinced me of his greatness. Three German translators had tried their luck and killed mercilessly one of my favorite poems, “If I Could Tell You” (Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957), which arises naturally from two colloquial idioms—“Time will tell” and “I told you so”:

And waving part, and waving drop from sight..Thanks to Anne Fletcher for bringing this poem to my attention.

More than any other disease, tuberculosis (TB), or consumption, shaped the social history of 19th-century Europe. Its impact on the artistic world was just as powerful, with artists offering their own commentaries on the disease through painting, poetry and opera. Consumption was almost a defining feature of Romanticism, the style of expression for which the era was known..According to The White Plague (1952) by René and Jean Dubos, Caucasian patients took on a profoundly anaemic countenance as they lost blood and iron – thus the title of their great history of the disease. The consumptive model Elizabeth Siddal, best known as the drowned Ophelia in John Everett Millais’s pre-Raphaelite painting, became an icon for her generation. Fashion-conscious, healthy women starved themselves and chemically whitened their skin to mimic this ‘consumptive’ look. Lord Byron, the most notorious of the Romantic poets, quipped that the affliction would have ladies saying: ‘See that poor Byron – how interesting he looks in dying.’ Indeed, the preponderance of Romantic writers, painters and composers with TB created a myth that consumption drove artistic genius. Many assumed that the spes phthisica, a kind of elation that intermingles with depression during the disease, elevated the mind..The truth, of course, is that TB’s impact on the arts was merely a reflection of the savagery with which it ravaged the general population – artists and everyone else. In 1801, up to one-third of all Londoners died from TB. Yet its course was insidious, with some victims dying slowly over months, and others – years. Talented victims, all of them doomed before the age of antibiotics, had time (paraphrasing Keats) for their pens to glean their teeming brains, in spite of, not because of, the disease.

to it the more nothing

can be taken away.

In 1921, having taken time off from his job at Lloyds Bank for what would now be called depression, TS Eliot spent three weeks convalescing in Margate. It was the hottest October in years. Every day, he got the tram from the Albemarle Hotel in Cliftonville to the sea front, and, sitting in Nayland Rock shelter, he wrote “some 50 lines” of his poem The Waste Land..These days, the hotel is a block of flats, and while the shelter is still a shelter, it is at present fenced off. Yet Eliot’s time in Margate, a brief interlude before travelling to a Swiss sanatorium, is preserved in Part III of The Waste Land: “On Margate Sands,” he wrote, “I can connect / Nothing with Nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands.” If this, among the fragmented voices of a poem designed to disorient, directly reflects the poet’s psychological state, it also reflects the enterprise: connecting “Nothing with Nothing”, and stitching together disparate parts of history and literature to make a polyphonic, modern masterpiece..Journeys with The Waste Land, an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, is currently displaying artworks in sync with Eliot’s poem. Contemporaneous Paul Nash paintings show the barbed wire of no man’s land, alongside Graham Sutherland’s response to Eliot’s line: “And the dead tree gives no shelter.” A Henry Moore drawing of stooped Londoners in a war shelter evokes something of what Eliot would have seen in his time in the “Unreal City”, attempting to make his way in literary London and finding it populated by men either unfit for service or physically deformed by it.

you’re feeling metaphorical,

nest can be the whatever

inside us that we think needs

protection, the whatever that is

small & hasn’t yet found its

way. Like us it has lived so long

on scraps, on what others have

left behind, it thinks it could live

on air, on words, forever almost,

it thinks it would be better to let

the predator kill it than to turn

its back on that child again,

forgetting that one lives inside

the other..About This Poem

“I generally have a problem with anthropomorphizing, with what’s called the pathetic fallacy, forgetting that we are all part of the deeper mystery of the natural world. I think our minds are the limits of what is measurable. I sometimes think that everything is measurable, yet the fact that a killdeer does this dance fills me with unspeakable sadness and joy.”

—Nick Flynn

IN AN ESSAY for The Best American Poetry blog on his selection process for the 2015 issue, Sherman Alexie noted that “[a]pproximately 99% of the poets are professors.” The percentage, in actuality, is a little bit lower than that, but like many jokes, there is a kernel of truth to it. Academic institutions are now the biggest steward of poets, who teach everything from freshmen composition courses to graduate workshops. While the financial viability of this arrangement for writers seems to be waning, as universities and colleges find it easier and cheaper to exploit the labor of academics, it is still the uncomfortable status quo..Evan Kindley’s Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture tells part of the story of how this system came to be. With the stories of a handful of prominent modernist poet-critics, he traces the shift in culture from the private stewardship of artists to their employment by academic institutions between the 1920s and ’50s. On the impact of the modernists, Kindley writes, “hardly any modernist managed to avoid leaving behind a sizable corpus of literary criticism […] they were the first to establish a particular archetype that still pertains nearly a hundred years later, a job description that those who desire a career in poetry still have to fit.” The transformation of the role of the poet-critic during the modernist period created the world wherein poets attempt to make a living through criticism and teaching.